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It seems like only yesterday…

On January 19th, 2000 a new not-for-profit organization was registered in New York State. It was called Publishers International Linking Association, Inc but was more commonly referred to as “CrossRef”. This means that Crossref will be 20 years old on January 19th, 2020 so I wanted to mark the occasion with a short post. We are planning more ways to mark our 20th anniversary later this year so keep a lookout.

It’s been a year since Metadata Manager was first launched in Beta.  We’ve received a lot of helpful feedback from many Crossref members who made the switch from Web Deposit Form to Metadata Manager for their journal article registrations.

The most common use for Metadata Manager is to register new DOIs for newly published articles. For the most part, this is a one-time process.  You enter the metadata, register your DOI, and success!

Isaac Farley, technical support manager, and Jon Stark, software developer, provide a glimpse into the history and current state of our popular monthly resolution reports. They invite you, our members, to help us understand how you use these reports. This will help us determine the best next steps for further improvement of these reports, and particularly what we do and don’t filter out of them.

English version –– Información en español In this post, Arley Soto shares some experiences about his work as a Crossref ambassador in Latin America. When I joined as a volunteer Crossref ambassador in 2018, I never imagined that in less than two years, I would have the opportunity to travel to three Latin American cities, visit Toronto, organize the first Crossref LIVE in Spanish and hold webinars in Spanish about Crossref’s services.

I’m happy to announce that Lucy Ofiesh has joined Crossref as our new Director of Finance and Operations. Lucy has experience supporting the sustainability and governance of not-for-profit organizations having held roles such as Executive Vice President of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and for the last few years as Chief Operating Officer at Center for Open Science, a Crossref member.

The first version of our metadata input schema (a DTD, to be specific) was created in 1999 to capture basic bibliographic information and facilitate matching DOIs to citations. Over the past 20 years the bibliographic metadata we collect has deepened, and we’ve expanded our schema to include funding information, license, updates, relations, and other metadata. Our schema isn’t as venerable as a MARC record or as comprehensive as JATS, but it’s served us well.

Crossref strives for balance. Different people have always wanted different things from us and, since our founding, we have brought together diverse organizations to have discussions—sometimes contentious—to agree on how to help make scholarly communications better. Being inclusive can mean slow progress, but we’ve been able to advance by being flexible, fair, and forward-thinking. We have been helped by the fact that Crossref’s founding organizations defined a clear purpose in our original certificate of incorporation, which reads:

Bibliographic references in scientific papers are the end result of a process typically composed of: finding the right document to cite, obtaining its metadata, and formatting the metadata using a specific citation style. This end result, however, does not preserve the information about the citation style used to generate it. Can the citation style be somehow guessed from the reference string only? TL;DR I built an automatic citation style classifier. It classifies a given bibliographic reference string into one of 17 citation styles or “unknown”.

TL;DR On Wednesday, October 2nd, 2019 we discovered that we had accidentally pushed the main Crossref system as part of a docker image into a developer’s account on Docker Hub. The binaries and configuration files that made up the docker image included embedded passwords and API tokens that could have been used to compromise our systems and infrastructure. When we discovered this, we immediately secured the repo, changed all the passwords and secrets, and redeployed the system code.

We’ve all been subject to floods of conference invitations, it can be difficult to sort the relevant from the not-relevant or (even worse) sketchy conferences competing for our attention. In 2017, DataCite and Crossref started a working group to investigate creating identifiers for conferences and projects. Identifiers describe and disambiguate, and applying identifiers to conference events will help build clear durable connections between scholarly events and scholarly literature. Chaired by Aliaksandr Birukou, the Executive Editor for Computer Science at Springer Nature, the group has met regularly over the past two years, collaborating to create use cases and define metadata to identify and describe conference series and events.